Mar. 6, 2013

Three happy fishermen show off their haul of large spoonbills from a previous snagging trip. / Missouri Department of Conservation

Written by

Ken

WHITE

Gary Heidrich, from left, Brenda Wulff, Bruce Drecktrah and Larry Steding pull a paddlefish from the James River near Cape Fair. The Missouri Department of Conservation uses the fish for breeding. / News-Leader file photo

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With the season now open in the four state trout parks, many anglers will be joining the growing number who throw a heavy weighted hook, cast blindly and hope to snag a fish that might weigh more than 100 pounds.

I am talking about snagging for spoonbills, which starts March 15. One Springfield angler, Jack Thomas, was fishing at Bennett Spring on the opening day of the trout parks.

“What a difference a couple of weeks make,” Thomas said. “Here I am fly fishing for trout, and on the 15th I will be casting a saltwater rig trying to hook a spoonbill — talk about variety of fishing.”

The spoonbills are relics from the past and could have easily fit in with creatures from the “Jurassic Park” movies. These oddities of nature feed by swimming with their big mouths open and filter their food — microscopic plankton.

Warsaw angler Bob Parker made his first snagging trip two years ago and hooked a 56-pound monster.

“I had always thought it was too much work to try to snag one of these big fish and never tried it until my neighbor, Carl Davis, asked me to go with him on the Osage River near Osceola,” Parker said. “After hooking my first paddlefish, I am more than ready for this season.”

Parker moved to Missouri from New York and had never heard of spoonbills until he arrived in Warsaw.

“After moving here several years ago, I heard about the big fish that had a big paddlelike nose,” he recalled. “I had heard guys at work say you don’t fish for them, you work for them. I couldn’t believe they only had one bone in their body and that was in their jaw. They are a very unusual fish but also tasty. We smoked some of the meat from that big one I hooked two years ago. It surprised us that it was so good. That’s another reason I’ll be out there after another one Friday morning.”

Tom Armstrong, of Clinton, is another who didn’t think much about snagging for big paddlefish until he tried it a few years ago.

“When I saw people fishing in that muddy water, I thought they were fishing blind,” Armstrong said. “They can’t see the fish, and spoonbills don’t hit a lure, so how can they enjoy fishing for them? After I finally tried it with a friend who had been snagging for more than 20 years, we both hooked fish that weighed more than 30 pounds. Since that trip I have become a confirmed snagger.”

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Armstrong remembers that first spoonbill like it was yesterday.

“There were a lot of boats in the river with guys flinging heavy weights,” he said. “I saw one angler hook a monster. While watching him bring the big fish close to his boat, I felt a tug on my 80-pound test line. I knew it was a big fish. After the fish made several long runs, I started to bring it in. When we finally got it in the boat, I couldn’t believe the size of that monster. It was by far the largest fish I had ever hooked. I had no idea that I would ever catch a fish that big. It was my biggest thrill of more than 20 years fishing.”

Brian Elkington, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service fish biologist who was stationed at the Columbia office, has handled spoonbills on rivers since 1997. Biologists from that office have gathered data from thousands of spoonbills caught from 22 states.

A 3-foot-long fish released in the Ohio River at Mount Vernon, Ind., in 1998 was caught by an angler eight years later in the Missouri River in South Dakota.

The fish had traveled 1,136 miles.

Another tagged spoonbill went the other direction and was later caught in the Kaskaskia River in Illinois.

The crew from Columbia keeps up with the data to manage what is arguably one of the greatest natural curiosities.

Craig Springer, editor of the Fish and Wildlife Service magazine Eddies, points out the value and interesting facts about this survivor from the past and the efforts to keep it going.

When the season opens March 15, Missouri snaggers might get off to a slow start, but there are plenty of fish in the hot spots, including the James River arm of Table Rock, the Osage and Niangua river arms of the Lake of the Ozarks, the Osage arm of Truman, as well as the Osage River below the Bagnell Dam and Osceola.

The spoonbill snagging season runs through April.

Although the Missouri Department of Conservation considered adding a permit for paddlefish anglers, the agency decided against that requirement this year.

There is little doubt that when March 15 rolls around, there will be lots of snaggers ready to hook a prehistoric fish that has survived for centuries.